Obama presses Congress on tax cuts

President Barack Obama on Wednesday again pressed Congress to reach an agreement to extend the middle class tax cut before Christmas, encouraging Americans to tell lawmakers they want to see a deal.

“I believe that both parties can agree on a framework” to avert the fiscal cliff by balancing long-term deficit reduction with a tax cut extension, Obama said in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, backed by a crowd of middle class Americans. “In fact, my hope is to get this done before Christmas.”

For months, Obama has been encouraging Congress to take quick action to extend the Bush-era tax cuts on the first $250,000 of income, which will keep an average of $2,200 in middle class families’ pocketbooks.

With the deadline looming at the end of the year, Obama is looking to continue the public push from his campaign to say more Americans voted for his broader strategy to managing the deficit and that the approach begins with extending the tax cuts for the middle class while raising taxes on higher incomes.

“I know some of this may sound familiar to you because we talked a lot about this during the campaign,” he said Wednesday. “This shouldn’t be a surprise to anybody. This was a major debate in the presidential campaign and in congressional campaigns all across the country and a clear majority of Americans — not just Democrats but also a lot of Republicans and a lot of independents — agreed we should have a balanced approach to deficit reduction that doesn’t hurt the economy and doesn’t hurt middle class families.”

Several congressional Republicans are edging toward Obama’s position. “I’m glad to see, if you’ve been reading the papers lately, that more and more Republicans in Congress seem to be agreeing with this idea that we should have a balanced approach,” he said. Rep. Tom Cole (R-Okla.) urged his colleagues Tuesday to agree to extend the tax cuts for all but the wealthiest Americans and to work quickly to reach a deal by the end of the year, POLITICO first reported.

Obama also warned that a failure to extend the tax cuts could put the economy in a downward spiral and make it even more difficult to reduce the deficit. But that can all be counteracted by ordinary Americans pressuring their representatives.